SDSU Mechanical Engineers Receive TMS Mathewson Award

A team of mechanical engineering researchers at SDSU and their collaborators have been chosen as recipients of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) AIME Champion H. Mathewson Award for their 2019 article, “Anisotropy of Mass Transfer During Sintering of Powder Materials with Pore–Particle Structure Orientation” in Metall Mater Trans A. 

Headed by SDSU Mechanical Engineering professor and college dean Eugene Olevsky and Mechanical Engineering professor Elisa Torresani, the project is in collaboration with Diletta Giuntini from Hamburg University of Technology; Chaoyi Zhu, Tyler Harrington, and Kenneth Vecchio from University of California San Diego (UCSD), Alberto Molinari from University of Trento, and Rajendra Bordia of Clemson University. 

Given by the TMS, this award was established to honor Dr. Champion H. Mathewson, President of AIME in 1943, and is made for a paper, or series of closely related papers with at least one common author that represents a notable contribution to materials science. 

The project involves collaborations between both junior and senior faculty across multiple institutions - and in some cases, internationally. 

The sintering project was initially organized and spearheaded by professor Olevsky, says Vecchio: “My group was brought in to solve a problem they couldn’t resolve without the collaboration.”

Olevsky, who has an affiliate appointment in UCSD’s Nanoengineering department, was connected to Vecchio’s team at SDSU through that when he reached out in 2017. 

"We now probably have another 10 papers published using that technique, because it really motivated us to expand what we can do with the technique. So I'm really pleased about that it became a driving force for a bunch of other research in my group."

The team would like to thank Oerlikon Group who helped them develop the tool used in the project.

"I really think we are always do better science as a team. And this just happened to be such a great fit because it was someone who's more mechanics person coming to someone who's more of a material science and materials characterization person, and the collaboration was just really fruitful here."

The award will be presented at the TMS-AIME Annual Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, March 2, in Anaheim California.